Studentification in Germany: How investors generate profits from student tenants in Goettingen and the impacts on urban segregation

Abstract

This paper presents a study about studentification in the medium-sized university town of Goettingen, Germany. While many studentification studies focus on the transformation of owner-occupied houses into houses of multiple occupation, this study is about displacement in the rental housing market. I argue that within this context, the displacement of marginalised social groups takes place through rental prices and private landlords’ preferences for students of higher education. Hence, I focus on how landlords extract high rents from their property without making serious investments and investigate landlords’ strategies for increasing their return on investment via higher education student tenants. I explain their strategies, grounding this research in semi-structured interviews with landlords, property managers and real estate agents, complemented by statistical data. I show that different rental strategies landlords apply lead to the separation of different social groups. Hence, this paper argues that the strategies of landlords have an important impact on urban segregation and urban development in cities. Therefore, a deeper investigation of these strategies would help us achieve a better understanding of how the process of studentification proceeds and how displacement takes place.